“Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path”

I read with great interest FiveThirtyEight‘s breakdown of “The Six Wings of the Democratic Party,” so you can imagine my amusement when “Progressive Old Guard” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) finally said what we all know to be true: the House would be ridiculously stupid to impeach President Trump.

Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.

At the beginning of the WaPo piece, the reporter notes that Pelosi reads a quote from Lincoln about the import of public opinion.

Nancy Pelosi stands up in her spacious office in the U.S. Capitol, walks past an enormous window with a commanding view of the Mall and the Washington Monument, and picks up a small plaque from her desk. A gift from Rep. Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.), the plaque has the familiar profile of a young Abraham Lincoln on one side. Pelosi returns to her chair holding the plaque on her palm and reads a quote from Lincoln etched on the reverse side: “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.”

Pelosi’s not wrong, though, as I noted last year, “even if the Mueller report cobbles together something shady that the media spins into hyper-drive but that fails to resonate with even fence-sitting Trump supporters, impeaching a sitting president without the consent of the people is a big mistake. Big.”

The fact is that you cannot impeach and successfully remove a sitting president unless the people are behind the effort. That takes, as Pelosi notes, “compelling and overwhelming” evidence of an actual impeachable offense, one that resonates with the majority of voters. That standard requires going beyond Orange Man Bad.

Steyer, of course, misses the point. Pelosi means that pursuing Trump’s impeachment is not worth the political losses the Democrats would experience as a result, including, but not limited to, the White House in 2020. They think they have a shot at it, and depending on their eventual nominee, they might. That all goes down the drain if the Democrat House attempts to remove Trump from office against the will of the people who put him there.

Pelosi wants to win back the Senate and the White House in 2020, and she knows that any move to impeach the president would put that in jeopardy.

WaPo continues:

For 2020, your goal is to keep control of the House and have a Democrat elected president.

And the Senate, the whole thing.

This is the focus of Democrat leadership, and the demands of the far left impeachment fanatics are unlikely to gain much ground, particularly while the Senate is still Republican.

Tom keep lighting your money on fire with your impeachment. There are still many chapters to play out so this isn’t over yet. You never know what Mueller is going to ultimately say, and then there’s always to SDNY as a backup plan. Pelosi is making a political calculation that impeachment will hurt the Dems more than Trump.

“And the Lord saith unto Tom Steyer, ‘I shall give unto thee resources beyond thy capacity to husband well, and thou shall be an example unto others of what not to be and what not to do. Thou ist a fool, and ye shall always be the same, and others shall learn from thouest stupidity’”

hrh40 types:
No, it is Fuzzy Slippers who “misses the point.” How? By not requiring Steyer to prove that POTUS has done anything against “our legal system” or that POTUS has done anything to be “accountable” for. That is the reason why impeachment shouldn’t be done. Not because of politics.

Lesson: NEVER accept the Left’s premise and answer to it; it’s almost always a lie. ALWAYS rephrase the Left’s premise with the facts, i.e, with the truth.

In the present case, for example, the Left is giving as its reason not to impeach that it would be bad for the country (and bad for the Dems in 2020), and thus making that the mass media’s (and media-numbed masses) conventional wisdom. Which leaves the notion intact that POTUS is actually guilty of impeachable offense but the magnanimous Dems are merely declining to put the country thru the trauma of impeachment proceedings. That is a lie.

No. The Truth is that POTUS is NOT GUILTY of impeachable offenses and that is why the Dems are not impeaching. Because. they. would. lose.

To repeat: NEVER accept the Left’s premise and argue in defense against it. Whoever asks the questions creates the premise and is on the attack that creates the Narrative. ALWAYS change the premise/Narrative by stating the TRUTH.

Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, said, “He’s just not worth it.”

Following the rule that you don’t bring a bill to the floor if you don’t have the votes, this translates as, “A bill of impeachment wouldn’t be successful, and its failure to pass would give Trump crowing points.”

This is Pelosi responding to those who declare last week’s cave to the communist children of the corn as a loss of control as Speaker. She is retaking control.

This cuts Adam Schiff’s ridiculous investigations at the knees by signalling to everyone that she will not allow any impeachment bills or motions to reach the House floor. So the there is no end game for the impeachment radicals. They will soon be facing very difficult re-election prospects for 2020. We are already burned out with all of the endless screeching. The dirty money sees no attractive options for 2020 and my just sit it out.

I don’t there was ever any real prospect of impeachment. It’s just clown talk to justify 2 more years of full-time smear Trump. They don’t have to impeach him to win, they just have to throw enough crap on the walls so make some stick.

Generally disagree. She is weathering an uprising that may have money and organization but will ultimately fail. America just isn’t that crazy yet and despite the MSM being in lock step in reporting a false narrative, people are quickly getting creeped-out.

Pelosi gave them the a lot of running room and rope to hang themselves with and is now boxing them in. This is a problem that the Dems have to solve for themselves. The Republicans are completely inept and will bumble their way into Trump running completely unopposed in 2020 into a landslide victory.

But I do agree that in the end, someone in the Dem party has to look like the adult in control. It MUST be Pelosi since she is the one who appears to have surrendered to the communist children of the corn.

Alas, the GOPe court jesters will prevent payback when Trump re-elected . Obama played this game for keeps. 2020 is counter attack time for Left and their RINO weannie lackeys (got to love commie speak…if I could find some way to use “capitalist roader” it would be great).

What political cost? In some places like California “ballot harvesting” and other fraudulent practices are well on their way to making voting meaningless. Democrat and GOPe Federal judges are already chipping away at what few anti-voting fraud measures states have passed into law.

Meanwhile the GOPe – the alleged opposition fresh from frittering away its House majority by NOT repealing Obamacare and improving border security – is going into its usual “MeToo” mode by refusing to forcibly confront Democrat anti-Semitism.

Democrats may be looking at the case of Obamacare. They lost power because of Obamacare; Republicans did not repeal it; Democrats returned to power after a few years. They may be gambling that the same thing will happen again, and impeaching Trump might be worth it.

Worse than that, the states (like Illinois) who will cast all of their electoral college votes to whoever wins the majority of national votes are gutting the very foundation of our three branch government. Those states could vote Republican and be over-ruled by their electoral college delegates.

The fact is that you cannot impeach and successfully remove a sitting president unless the people are behind the effort.

It’s not really obvious that this is a fact. There’s no legal provision for “the people” to do anything about it. Sure, the Furies might fly in during the next election, but there isn’t much the voters can do when presented with the usual opposing slates of career suckups and similar non-entities.

The point is not that there are no impeachable offenses against the POTUS. That is largely irrelevant, as this is all political to begin with. There are two very important considerations, here.

The first is timing. If impeachment were done in 2019, there would be a very good chance that the trial, in the Senate, would be completed by very early 2020. And, Trump would likely prevail. This would leave Democratic lawmakers to contend with the results of that in the middle of an election year, probably before the 2020 primaries. This could, likely would, put any Democrat majority, in the Congress, at risk. It would also either cast Trump in a sympathetic light, or allow him to recover from the attack, before the general election. And, he would probably win that election.

The second factor is that Trump’s defense would be able to introduce evidence illuminating Democrat wrong doing, including illegal actions, which would then be used politically, and possibly legally, against prominent Democrats. The only viable charge would be obstruction of justice, which would have to be tied to attempts to influence the “investigation” into Trump/Russia collusion, which would make that whole kettle of fish fair game for the defense, including the actions of the Obama Administration with regard to that. And, the only verifiable collusion between any political campaign and Russian state actors, during the 2016 campaign, involved the Clinton Campaign. Then you have all of the actions of the Obama DOJ, many of which were patently illegal, which the MSM ignores, as well as the illegal leaks during that time period. Impeachment would create a bombshell. But. more likely it would hurt the Dems, rather than Trump.

So, no impeachment. However, the opposition research against Trump, being conducted by the House of Representatives through its various committee “investigations” involving Trump’s business dealings, will continue. Negative information will be used, either overtly or through leaks, to undermine Trump during the 2020 campaign. This is simply a continuation of the operation conducted by the DOJ, under the Obama Administration, in 2016. By stating that impeachment is off the table, at the moment, this takes pressure of the House oppo operation to dredge up dirt on Trump and allows time for the base to forget that those members who were pushing so heavily for impeachment failed to deliver or to decide that they were thwarted by Pelosi and the leadership.

Politics is very Machiavellian. You have to peel back the layers of the onion to see what is probably going on inside.

Neo argues above that the political cost of the Clinton impeachment did not affect the Republicans “since they lost only 2 seats in the 2000 election”.

I don’t know if Neo is correct in asserting that the Repubs lost a net 2 seats in the House in 2000. Let’s say he’s correct.

But that election gave us Adam Schiff–that’s a heck of a price to pay. The Democrat party poured money into the 2000 election to “get” Jim Rogin–who had led the Republican impeachment effort in the House. It set the then record for the most money spent in a campaign for a seat in the House. And the Dem who beat Rogin was –you guessed it–Adam Schiff.

That is exactly correct. James Rogan was my congressman back then, a reliable Republican. But because he led the floor fight for impeachment, he was targeted by Hollywood and true to form, the CA Republicans didn’t defend him. Big loss.

WASHINGTON — A key House investigator said Tuesday that Speaker Nancy Pelosi is “absolutely right” to hold back on impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff sided with Pelosi, who said Democrats shouldn’t pursue impeachment unless there’s overwhelming and bipartisan support for doing so. Her comments to The Washington Post riled some liberals, including new lawmakers who helped flip the chamber to Democratic control.

Together, Pelosi and Schiff’s remarks are designed to signal to outspoken Democrats in the House that senior lawmakers in the Democrat-controlled House aren’t behind any drive to impeach Trump. The delicate issue returned to the surface after a week of ugly dispute in Pelosi’s ranks over how to word a resolution condemning anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim discrimination.

As Dems have taught us so well, it’s the seriousness of the charge that’s important, not the nature of the evidence. We need multiple investigations into Tom Steyer and ALL of his associates and family.

“Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.”

Yep, that goes with “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.”

Translation: People like a working economy, lower taxation, and reduced regulatory hurdles. So what we Dems have to do is wreck the economy, fling around more mud than a pig pit, and drive his numbers down by any means necessary, including lying, cheating, and stealing.

Here’s another rule of thumb. Reality is defined as “what’s there.” If you don’t know what’s there, don’t be in a hurry to go there. It’s alright to threaten to go there, but only fools like Maxine Waters rush in to danger, real or imagined. Remember the boy who cried wolf.
It coincides with the rule, “If you’re looking at a meaningless win, or even a Pyrrhic victory, withdraw from the field. Good Generals are those fortunate souls who carefully pick battles that lead to victory, or strategically retreat.
It was Nancy who counciled: Do whatever you have to do, just win?

I’m with the dems, lets wealth tax the ever living daylights out of these mostly liberal billionaires. It isn’t like they don’t have the means, lawyers and money to fight back compared to the rest of us.
But putting them in the dems hate crosshairs would be fun to watch as the dems have been taking so much of their money that we might see a third party that would really take votes and money away from the dems. And that would be a good thing.

The statement from Pelosi is coherent enough, but it’s cheap, snide, superficial, and ineffectual smariness. Junior high level stuff. Is she trying to come back after the pasting she took last week by appealing more sympathetically to the D’rats large swarm of intellectual lightweights? Becoming a pop heroine by climbing down to A. Psycho-Chick’s brainpower class? Very odd.

Poor Tom Steyer has the advantage of seeing things from outside the system. Pelosi, shrewd career politician that she is, knows that a floor vote to impeach will end apocalyptically for the DNC next election, in a fashion that they may never recover from.

Steyer can shriek from the balcony because he has no dogs in the race.